“if this endeavor or this activity is of human origin, it will destroy
itself. But if it comes from God, you will not
be able to destroy them.”(Acts 5 33-39)

In support of his case, he cited earlier popular
“messiahs” that had come and gone of their own accord.

Today, when the West is challenged by radical Islam,
Gamaliel’s sage advice rings true.
Leaving the Islamic Middle East alone to work out its issues may be the
most prudent and productive response.

A thumbnail portrait of Middle Eastern history and
quick peek into the probable future will provide useful perspective.

From ancient times up until the 16th
Century, the legendary Silk Road and associated spice trading routes were the commercial arteries through
which Europe obtained precious silks, spices and even opiates. These routes passed through
Persia and the Arabic lands. The Middle
East was prime real estate and its inhabitants prosperous traders.

Fortunes plummeted when Columbus returned from his voyage
to the New World. With the Age of
Discovery, oceanic shipping displaced land based commerce, Thus the Atlantic facing nations including
England, France, Spain and the Netherlands rose to world dominance while the
Middle East and Italy, then the commercial hub of Europe, withered into irrelevance.

However, the invention of the internal combustion
engine coupled with the discovery of Middle Eastern petroleum made the Islamic
desert wastelands a hot commodity again.
Following the First World War, the Western imperial powers assured
themselves of access to Mid-East oil by divvying up the region into client
states ruled by compliant war lords.

From that time onward, imperialist meddling in
Mid-East by Europeans and the U.S. has never ceased. A century of political,
economic and military intervention by Christian, Jewish and secular Westerners has
stoked nationalist and religious resentments alike. This is manifested in the violent “blowback” that Ron Paul and our own CIA has documented.

A look forward validates the Gamaliel strategy. The fracking boom combined with new energy efficient
technologies have broken the Mid-East stranglehold on energy. The world is awash in petroleum and prices
have tanked. Experts estimate that we
have a supply of over 200 years of crude in the ground. My guess is that way before the supply runs out,
the human race will have moved onto new energy technologies and Mid-East
oil will as relevant as Silk Road trade routes in a jet plane world.

As oil income wanes in importance, the region’s
people will seek other livelihoods. This
will require innovation and investment which demands economic and social liberalization. At that point you can kiss radical Islam goodbye unless, it is “from
God” as Gamaliel hedged 2,000 years back.

If it is from God, so be it. But I don’t think so. Meanwhile, Islamists use political, cultural
and emotional

Jujutsu. Jihadists turn the force of Western incursions back upon
their opponents. The harder that America strikes at them, the more foolish we
look.

A half century ago, The United States faced a far
more formidable threat from the Soviet Union, a true military super power. At that time Princeton scholar, George Kennan,
recommended a policy of “containment”, diplomatic and economic initiatives to
hem in Stalinist – Soviet expansionism. This
formed the basis of U.S. foreign policy for the next 40 years.

The Marshall plan to rebuild war torn Europe and
Asia was the type of program that he envisioned. This was s patient Gamaliel
approach. Unfortunately, America’s militarists misrepresented Kennan’s intent. They exploited it to justify a massive
military buildup, nuclear proliferation and unceasing armed intervention the
world over.

President Eisenhower, the diplomat/warrior hero of
World War II, perceived the folly of continual proxy wars and runaway military
expansion. He withdrew from the Korean
War and warned his countrymen of the
dangers of the “military industrial” complex in
his presidential farewell speech:

“In the councils of government, we must guard
against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought,
by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of
misplaced power exists and will persist.”

Ultimately, America prevailed in its showdown with
the Soviet Union, because of Gamaliel theory, not armed confrontation. Because Soviet Communism was oppositional to
human nature, it collapsed under its own weight. It was of man, not of God.

“a large standing
Army in time of Peace hath ever been considered dangerous to the liberties of a
Country…it could not be done
without great oppression of the people.”

America’s enormous warfare establishment
makes us unsafe by intervening in intractable international conflicts that are
beyond our control and in which we have no moral standing or compelling
interest. Americans are best served by
the Gamaliel strategy of allowing the will of God or nature to take its course,

Friday, February 13, 2015

Up until now, the
Piltdown Man was one of the great scientific hoaxes of all time. In 1912, a collection of
carefully doctored human-like remains were unearthed near the village of Piltdown
in Sussex, England. These findings were
put forward and readily accepted as the missing evolutionary link between man
and ape. This farce stood for nearly 50
years as scientific “consensus” until it was demonstrated that this discovery
was a mélange of human and orangutan bones of fairly recent vintage. They had been dyed and filed to look like the
Real McCoy fossils of a heretofore unknown species.

To this day, the jokesters remain anonymous and no one was bilked out of
billions of dollars. The worst that can
be said is that the worldwide scientific community got punked and ate a healthy
slice of humble pie.

Scientific shenanigans are afoot again in new millennium. This time the tables are turned. Scientists are pulling the wool over our eyes
with the climate change scam. In a February
7 Telegraph article, Christopher
Booker reports on how global temperature data has been fudged upward at
monitoring stations throughout the world.
The article is based upon the investigations of Paul Homewood. Booker writes:

“When
future generations look back on the global-warming scare of the past 30 years,
nothing will shock them more than the extent to which the official temperature
records – on which the entire panic ultimately rested – were systematically
“adjusted” to show the Earth as having warmed much more than the actual data
justified.”

But what about those poor polar bears whose icy home is melting away? Homewood demonstrates that is not global warning
that is causing the thaw.Rather the diminished
ice is the result of:

“cyclical
shifts in a major Atlantic current – this last peaked at just the time 75 years
ago when Arctic ice retreated even further than it has done recently. The
ice-melt is not caused by rising global temperatures at all.”

And why would scientists throughout the world be party to such as scam? The reason is that “Big Science” is
underwritten by “Big Government”. Just
as Big Government handsomely paid Big Science to create weapons of mass destruction
and disruption, they are now in cahoots to shake taxpayers down with the warming
scare.

Another present day “scientific” canard comes courtesy of those who
practice economics as if it were particle physics. Econometricians would have us think they can
pull a few levers and people will respond predictably as if they were rats
in a Skinner Box.

Thus central bankers adjust the flow of legal tender intent upon
modifying our behavior, supposedly for our own wellbeing. Here is what happens:

1.Elite
bankers and financiers get newly created money first to invest or spend it as
they see fit.

2.This new
money makes it way downstream in the economy, thereby devaluing the currency
that Joe and Jane Sixpack hold. This
drives up the nominal cash prices of the things that Joe and Jane must
buy. Meanwhile the elites were able to
buy things at lower prices before inflationary pricing kicked in.

3.The U.S.
Fed seems pleased with itself that the Consumer Price Index is increasing at a “modest”
and “steady” 2% per year.

4.This means
that if Joe and Jane just hold on to their money, it decreases in worth by 2%
each year.

5.Since The
Fed is also suppressing interest rates at near 0%, Joe and Jane will still lose
purchasing power

by putting money in a savings account – formerly a time honored way of
building up middle class wealth in America.

6.So it
order to break even, Joe and Jane must move their savings into risky
investments like securities and commodities.

7.This
again benefits the elite Wall Street crowd by artificially pumping up the value
of the stocks and bonds that they hold.

policies of The Fed and
world’s central bankers rob unsuspecting millions of their savings. They encourage malinvestment and inflate
financial bubbles that create hardship and misery on a global scale.

The real question is, “why do people keep falling for the empty promises
of the ruling elites?” I suspect it that
people have lost faith in themselves and in any other higher power. Therefore, like captives under the spell of a
worldwide Stockholm Syndrome, they wish to believe that their captors have
their best interests at heart.

The moral at the end of Steve Goodman’s con man saga, Turnpike
Tom, is this:

“Remember
that you only fall for
Lies and stories when you really want to”